Dell today announced new solutions, partnerships and services that
enable customers to take advantage of major transformative forces in the
data center, focusing specifically on the smooth migration to and
management of converged, virtualized and cloud infrastructures. As of
early 2012, 50 percent of all installed workloads were running VMs, so
many of the easily virtualized workloads are already virtualized,
according to Gartner1. As this number grows rapidly, Dell is
accelerating its commitment to open innovation and scalable
architectures to enable customers to reap the benefits.

“In an effort to drive IT simplicity, efficiency and predictability,
enterprises are rapidly embracing converged, virtualized and cloud
environments,” said Marius Haas, president of Enterprise Solutions
Group, Dell. “Dell is helping businesses rethink their approach to the
data center, to help them realize the full benefits of these trends. By
combining Dell’s scalable design focus and powerful data center
offerings with Dell’s enterprise software assets and services deployment
philosophy, Dell is uniquely positioned to help customers build an open
and flexible data center of the future.”

Converged Infrastructure

As part of Dell’s customer-inspired, end-to-end solutions vision, Dell
is quickly building upon its recent announcement
of Active
Infrastructure, Dell’s family of converged infrastructure solutions.
With the announcement of the first set of workload
solution reference architectures certified, qualified and optimized
for the Active
System 800, Dell is giving IT organizations blueprints to deploy VDI
and unified communications and collaboration applications essential to
any organization. These workload solutions enable IT organizations to
help businesses maximize workforce productivity, deliver faster and
efficient results, and enable organizations to scale. The new workloads
include:

In addition, Dell expanded upon its vision for Active Infrastructure by
sharing how it plans to continue to fill the gaps in the industry with
intuitive, flexible and comprehensive converged infrastructure solutions
for customers. By building upon scalable organic and acquired IP from Gale
Technologies, Dell is creating broader business impact beyond the
infrastructure to the applications and workloads that truly power
businesses. Today, Dell is sharing three key elements of its Active
Infrastructure vision, including:

The ability to provision workloads in just a matter of hours
after an Active System 800 arrives fully assembled and crated at the
customer site2. Typically, deploying new IT services can
take months, according to IDC3. Active
System Manager enhanced with Gale Technologies IP would enable IT
admins to not only rapidly provision physical infrastructure but also
deploy either virtual clusters in an infrastructure-as-a-service
manner or highly-available instances of common business workloads
using standardized templates. The business benefits from improved IT
responsiveness and faster return on investment.

The integration of Dell Fluid Cache technology into Active
Infrastructure. By introducing tier 0 storage in servers that is
integrated with Dell’s Compellent storage array, Active Infrastructure
customers could extend the benefits of virtualization to
performance-sensitive, mission-critical applications.

The flexibility to support select third-party platforms and integrate
into existing infrastructure deployments and management frameworks.
Future versions of Active System Manager enhanced with Gale
Technologies IP would allow customers to support third-party platforms
that are already deployed, helping save time, money, and creating a
flexible, open, modern converged environment. Dell will also enable a
broad ecosystem of partners for Active System Manager as well as
provide a robust set of APIs to enable custom integrations with
home-grown system management infrastructure.

Virtualization

With leading innovation in server density in the PowerEdge 12th
generation portfolio, Dell’s year-over-year x86 server shipment growth
outpaced the worldwide industry and the other two largest competitors,
according to International Data Corporation’s (IDC) Q3
2012 Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker. Dell is helping customers
optimize their virtualized data centers with 376 percent more virtual
machines per U of rack space than HP4. Enhancements to Dell
OpenManage systems management solutions enable customers to take
advantage of the advanced management capabilities inherent in Dell
servers, storage and networking devices, with key benefits including:

Simplified, remote management, with a time savings for a single system
of up to 25 percent, that helps eliminate agent-based maintenance
functions that rob IT resources of performance, power and productivity.

Enhanced automation with the ability to capture system profiles and
apply them to new systems to reduce repetitive manual tasks and
operational expenses for deployment. “Time to deployment” improvements
increases data center resource efficiency.

Enhanced availability and security by decreasing service cycle down
time, increasing problem identification and remediation. Dell
SupportAssist, integrated with OpenManage Essentials, is a proactive
capability that ensures maximum uptime by automatically transmitting
troubleshooting information to Dell technical support, which in turn
hastens resolution and parts replacement.

Cloud Storage, Open Source and Big Data Solutions

Dell announced new options for customers exploring various cloud storage
options, and other new OpenStack-based products and Emerging Solutions
Ecosystem partners to enable customers to take full advantage of open
source cloud and big data solutions.

In the cloud: Dell partners Ippany B.V. and Mezeo Software have certified
solutions with Dell to enable secure and mobile corporate
data collaboration via private cloud solutions, based on the Dell
Fluid File System and Dell
DX Object Storage Platform. These solutions give customers secure
access to corporate data anywhere, and help support the growing
demands of IT organizations looking to support BYOD (bring your own
device) initiatives while protecting the security and availability of
corporate data. Ippany B.V. and Mezeo Software are part of the growing Dell
storage partner ecosystem that is certified to support a range of
customer requirements for storage, data management and vertical
applications.

On-premise-to-cloud: For Dell customers using EqualLogic
storage, and interested in exploring cloud storage, Dell plans to make
available in 2013 an EqualLogic driver for Crowbar, the open source
software framework developed by Dell to enable Dell storage with
OpenStack clouds.

Open source cloud: Inktank joined Dell’s
Emerging Solutions Ecosystem, a partnership program designed to
deliver complementary and interoperable hardware, software and
services components. The Inktank
partnership provides Dell customers with an additional cloud-based
storage option compatible with the OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution
and based on the Ceph distributed storage system. Ceph is designed to
enable scalable object, block and file system storage in a single
cluster.

Dell is expanding its commitment to open innovation and support for its
ecosystem of open partners:

Dell is building Crowbar 2.0,
and engaging with this community to update this open source software
framework, which enables customers to install cloud software across
clusters and scale out systems quickly and automatically. Crowbar’s
open source model is critical to Dell Enterprise Systems Group’s open
innovation strategy.

And, thanks to thousands of project Sputnik beta program applications
from developers, Dell has introduced a client-to-cloud developer
solution – the Dell
XPS 13 laptop, Developer Edition. This project was the first from
Dell’s innovation program, established to enable and fund innovation
from anyone in the company. The second project from this incubation
program, RIPTide,
is a real-time analytics solution that can assemble relevant data sets –
structured and unstructured – on-the-fly, using real-time data
integration enabled by Dell Boomi and real-time business intelligence
capabilities for reports, dashboards, analytics, and services for easy
deployment with mid-market customers.

Availability

The Ippany B.V. and Mezeo Software private cloud solutions certified
with Dell storage are available today.

The Active System 800 and Active System Manager are currently
available in the U.S. and will be available globally in February 2013.

The Active System 800 workloads solutions reference architectures are
now available for VMware View, and Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and
Lync 2010. The workload solution reference architecture for Citrix
XenDesktop will be available at the beginning of 2013.

The new solutions and vision described for Active Infrastructure will
roll out in the second half of 2013.

2 All Active System beta customers were able to deploy the
solution within four hours of delivery.

3 According to the December 2011 IDC Converged Infrastructure
Survey 2011: Out of the Clouds, Down to Earth, 57 percent of respondents
said deploying new IT services can take more than 31 days. Of those
respondents, 37 percent said it could take 91 to 180 days.

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to customers and delivers innovative
technology and services that give them the power to do more. For more
information, visit www.dell.com.

Dell World

Join us at Dell World 2012 – The Power to Do More. Technology
professionals will learn from one another and identify key challenges
and opportunities connected to the top forces changing business today.
Learn more at www.dellworld.com,
attend our virtual event at Dell
World: Live Online or follow #DellWorld
on Twitter.

Dell and PowerEdge are trademarks of Dell Inc. Dell disclaims any
proprietary interest in the marks and names of others.

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